Caching is found in many areas of computer science, wholly consistent with the dictionary definition of “a safe place of hiding or storing things” (see, e.g., in Webster's New World Dictionary of the American, 2nd college ed. 1976). Processors can have many levels of caches (see Hennessy, John and David A Patterson, Computer Architecture A Quantitative Approach 2nd ed. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1996, p. 375), while some file systems can also have caches (see Solomon, David and Mark Russinovich, Inside Microsoft Windows 2000 3rd ed. Redmond: Microsoft Press, 2000, p. 646). Applications, such as HTTP servers (Fielding, R., et al., RFC 2068, 1997, p. 70, http colon backslash backslash www dot ietf dot org backslash rf backslash rfc2068 dot txt), may have them as well. Further examples abound. Some applications even have application specific caches in the operating system kernel (Hu, Elbert, et al., “Adaptive Fast Path Architecture”, IBM Journal of Research and Development, March 2001, p. 191–206). The term “kernel” is commonly understood to refer to that portion of the operating system that operates in privileged mode; it is the essential part of an operating system that performs basic functions and services.
However, to date there has not been known to exist any universal operating system kernel environment cache that is independent of the source of the data. A need has thus been recognized in connection with overcoming such a shortcoming.